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I haven't made up my mind about whether web fonts are a good or bad thing. On one had I understand the designer's desire to express themselves artistically (or

I haven't made up my mind about whether web fonts are a good or bad thing. On one had I understand the designer's desire to express themselves artistically (or even sometimes implement functionality that wouldn't be available otherwise), on the other hand I often feel more comfortable with my own font choices and am glad that Firefox lets me override most fonts with defaults.

kbelder 5y ago
I think web fonts are massively overused. Sticking with the user's configured selections are better unless there are very strong reasons you need to over-ride them. It's extra resources, time, and complexity spent on forcing something on the visitor that in most situations they don't want or care about.
- zzo38computer 5y ago
  I agree. (The document may specify what language the text is in and whether or not fix-pitch is wanted; the user settings should then be used to determine what font that is.) Actually, I generally would usually avoid CSS entirely, since the user's styles are generally more suitable. (The "font-display" setting is also a setting that the user might want to change even if font downloading is enabled. My idea of "meta-CSS" would give you this and many other things for free. Meta-CSS would not inherently allow the timing to be adjusted, but it is a feature that can be added too if it is wanted.) Another thing that I might want is to enable the document to specify its own fonts if it is SVG or PDF, but to disallow HTML documents from specifying their own fonts.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    > Actually, I generally would usually avoid CSS entirely, since the user's styles are generally more suitable. I very much doubt that's true for the average user, who will simply be using the browser's built-in default – which to an not inconsiderable extent is rather constrained by backwards compatibility concerns rather than being truly optimised for usage as "the only stylesheet you'll ever need". Besides, even with a boring plain old homepage-and-definitively-not-a-web-app it's not too difficult to run into the limitations of what you can achieve without some custom styling even purely in terms of basic layouting and typography.
- vbernat 5y ago
  I always find builtin fonts difficult to pair when you want to use monospace for code. If you take Times New Roman and Courier New for example, Courier New is quite larger visually, so you would need to use a smaller point size for it. But how to do that when you need to handle fallbacks? On my blog, I am pairing Merriweather with a custom version of Iosevka to match x-height and ascendant height. I think this is less disturbing when reading.
  - jraph 5y ago
    For me, this is a bug of the OS or the browser. On my OS, Noto Sans is the default sans-serif font and Noto Mono the default monospace font and they pair impeccably. Whatever font you are telling my browser to use will probably be worse for me (at least because of the loading time, and because it is actually hard to match the readability of Noto in my opinion). It's unfortunate Courier New is both so badly different from the regular fonts (and so bad at all, by the way) and also the default on Windows.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      Courier New, with all its unfortunate quirks, is there for a reason, AFAICT. It copies the typewriter font metrics. There are many situations where texts are measured by the number of "standard typewriter" characters and lines, established like 100 years ago. Using Courier New for code samples is not a great idea. I think it comes from the times when good monospace fonts did not yet exist. I always change this default, andvi wish browsers somehow stopped clinging to it.
    - vbernat 5y ago
      Unfortunately, most people won't change their browser defaults. It doesn't mean they won't be annoyed by the bad visuals.
- 542458 5y ago
  I think this argument falls apart here: “the user's *configured* selections”. 99%+ of users don’t configure anything and just have the browser’s defaults. This isn’t because they love the defaults, it’s because they don’t know/care that you can configure things.
  - waheoo 5y ago
    So your argument for displaying sites in fonts users don't care about is that the user doesn't care about fonts? Why not just let system designers choose the fonts their users are subjected to by default. At least they seem to care more about accessibility than XYZ.coms marketing department.
    - 542458 5y ago
      As a user, I might not change the config because: * I don’t know there’s a config at all * I know there’s a config, but I don’t know enough about fonts to make a good choice * Most sites override my config anyways (unless I chose an even more aggressive config that breaks websites), so why would I care? * The idea of some site specifying a font does not bother me, even if it’s a web font that will cause an extra 25kb of download. For what it’s worth, I really like fonts and know my way around the Firefox config, but I honestly do not care enough to change the default font because of the last two items on that list.
      - majewsky 5y ago
        * I know there's a config, but I'm not on my own machine * I know there's a config, but this is my work machine and corporate IT has blocked the browser prefs dialog via group policy
prox 5y ago
Long story short : designers don’t always build sites. With easy CMS solutions, content managers instead of designers, you get questionable font choices. It’s not as bad as the early days of Comic Sans, but there’s still a lot of work for typography experts out there.
yannikyeo 5y ago
Stackoverflow is switching to use system font https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063991 Other big site such as Github is using system font as well. It appears there is a trend to abandon web fonts.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  Two don't make a trend when we're talking about billions of web sites. Typography it too important to abandon it in favor of whatever defaults Microsoft or Apple have enabled on their platforms.
- tdaltonc 5y ago
  GitHub and Stackoverflow are interesting cases from a webfont perspective. They have the benefit that most of their users are repeat visitors that means they'll likely have the designers prefered fonts cached from a previous visit. They also both need to support EVERYTHING. Could you imagine the HN posts if they didn't? "Github doesn't support U+25C8! This crashed my Rust server, invalidated my identity, and made my grandparents cry!" In that StackExchange post you linked to, they mentioned make their own branded web font. That's definitely what I would be advocating for if I were there. The case for Github making their own font is even stronger. Microsoft has a very good font team. Designing a family of brand fonts for GitHub would be a very cool project (How many brands care about their fixed width font as much as github?)
lhorie 5y ago
Personally, as a user, I'm not going to a website to appreciate the owner's artistic sensibilities. IMHO, system fonts are perfectly readable; the trade-offs involved in a site owner imposing custom web fonts don't seem to take into account my priorities as a user.
vlmutolo 5y ago
A site using web fonts doesn't force the web client to use them. The user agent should be perfectly capable of replacing the site's font choices with its own and not even downloading the web fonts if it's known ahead of time that the user doesn't want them.
tdaltonc 5y ago
The alternative isn't what you think it is. You might hope if web fonts were banished, designers would use system fonts. But there was a time before web fonts, what that's not what they did. They'd do their typesetting in photoshop/Illustrator and then upload images. That's the world we'd be going back to. You, personally, should be glad web fonts are a thing because it makes it easy for you to restyle them on your computer. If a world without web fonts that wouldn't be possible.
- bouke 5y ago
  Or even use Flash to do the rendering. There even was some library to do this for you.
grishka 5y ago
Yeah I mean > This is a good base because it lets website visitors start reading your content right away They're already reading the content. The one job your website had has already been accomplished without the custom font. As this guy[1] said, you first serve what's essential for your website's functionality, and then you stop. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U

kbelder 5y ago

I think web fonts are massively overused. Sticking with the user's configured selections are better unless there are very strong reasons you need to over-ride them. It's extra resources, time, and complexity spent on forcing something on the visitor that in most situations they don't want or care about.

zzo38computer 5y ago
I agree. (The document may specify what language the text is in and whether or not fix-pitch is wanted; the user settings should then be used to determine what font that is.) Actually, I generally would usually avoid CSS entirely, since the user's styles are generally more suitable. (The "font-display" setting is also a setting that the user might want to change even if font downloading is enabled. My idea of "meta-CSS" would give you this and many other things for free. Meta-CSS would not inherently allow the timing to be adjusted, but it is a feature that can be added too if it is wanted.) Another thing that I might want is to enable the document to specify its own fonts if it is SVG or PDF, but to disallow HTML documents from specifying their own fonts.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  > Actually, I generally would usually avoid CSS entirely, since the user's styles are generally more suitable. I very much doubt that's true for the average user, who will simply be using the browser's built-in default – which to an not inconsiderable extent is rather constrained by backwards compatibility concerns rather than being truly optimised for usage as "the only stylesheet you'll ever need". Besides, even with a boring plain old homepage-and-definitively-not-a-web-app it's not too difficult to run into the limitations of what you can achieve without some custom styling even purely in terms of basic layouting and typography.
vbernat 5y ago
I always find builtin fonts difficult to pair when you want to use monospace for code. If you take Times New Roman and Courier New for example, Courier New is quite larger visually, so you would need to use a smaller point size for it. But how to do that when you need to handle fallbacks? On my blog, I am pairing Merriweather with a custom version of Iosevka to match x-height and ascendant height. I think this is less disturbing when reading.
- jraph 5y ago
  For me, this is a bug of the OS or the browser. On my OS, Noto Sans is the default sans-serif font and Noto Mono the default monospace font and they pair impeccably. Whatever font you are telling my browser to use will probably be worse for me (at least because of the loading time, and because it is actually hard to match the readability of Noto in my opinion). It's unfortunate Courier New is both so badly different from the regular fonts (and so bad at all, by the way) and also the default on Windows.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Courier New, with all its unfortunate quirks, is there for a reason, AFAICT. It copies the typewriter font metrics. There are many situations where texts are measured by the number of "standard typewriter" characters and lines, established like 100 years ago. Using Courier New for code samples is not a great idea. I think it comes from the times when good monospace fonts did not yet exist. I always change this default, andvi wish browsers somehow stopped clinging to it.
  - vbernat 5y ago
    Unfortunately, most people won't change their browser defaults. It doesn't mean they won't be annoyed by the bad visuals.
542458 5y ago
I think this argument falls apart here: “the user's *configured* selections”. 99%+ of users don’t configure anything and just have the browser’s defaults. This isn’t because they love the defaults, it’s because they don’t know/care that you can configure things.
- waheoo 5y ago
  So your argument for displaying sites in fonts users don't care about is that the user doesn't care about fonts? Why not just let system designers choose the fonts their users are subjected to by default. At least they seem to care more about accessibility than XYZ.coms marketing department.
  - 542458 5y ago
    As a user, I might not change the config because: * I don’t know there’s a config at all * I know there’s a config, but I don’t know enough about fonts to make a good choice * Most sites override my config anyways (unless I chose an even more aggressive config that breaks websites), so why would I care? * The idea of some site specifying a font does not bother me, even if it’s a web font that will cause an extra 25kb of download. For what it’s worth, I really like fonts and know my way around the Firefox config, but I honestly do not care enough to change the default font because of the last two items on that list.
    - majewsky 5y ago
      * I know there's a config, but I'm not on my own machine * I know there's a config, but this is my work machine and corporate IT has blocked the browser prefs dialog via group policy

prox 5y ago

Long story short : designers don’t always build sites. With easy CMS solutions, content managers instead of designers, you get questionable font choices. It’s not as bad as the early days of Comic Sans, but there’s still a lot of work for typography experts out there.

yannikyeo 5y ago

Stackoverflow is switching to use system font https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063991 Other big site such as Github is using system font as well. It appears there is a trend to abandon web fonts.

arkitaip 5y ago
Two don't make a trend when we're talking about billions of web sites. Typography it too important to abandon it in favor of whatever defaults Microsoft or Apple have enabled on their platforms.
tdaltonc 5y ago
GitHub and Stackoverflow are interesting cases from a webfont perspective. They have the benefit that most of their users are repeat visitors that means they'll likely have the designers prefered fonts cached from a previous visit. They also both need to support EVERYTHING. Could you imagine the HN posts if they didn't? "Github doesn't support U+25C8! This crashed my Rust server, invalidated my identity, and made my grandparents cry!" In that StackExchange post you linked to, they mentioned make their own branded web font. That's definitely what I would be advocating for if I were there. The case for Github making their own font is even stronger. Microsoft has a very good font team. Designing a family of brand fonts for GitHub would be a very cool project (How many brands care about their fixed width font as much as github?)

lhorie 5y ago

Personally, as a user, I'm not going to a website to appreciate the owner's artistic sensibilities. IMHO, system fonts are perfectly readable; the trade-offs involved in a site owner imposing custom web fonts don't seem to take into account my priorities as a user.

vlmutolo 5y ago

A site using web fonts doesn't force the web client to use them. The user agent should be perfectly capable of replacing the site's font choices with its own and not even downloading the web fonts if it's known ahead of time that the user doesn't want them.

tdaltonc 5y ago

The alternative isn't what you think it is. You might hope if web fonts were banished, designers would use system fonts. But there was a time before web fonts, what that's not what they did. They'd do their typesetting in photoshop/Illustrator and then upload images. That's the world we'd be going back to. You, personally, should be glad web fonts are a thing because it makes it easy for you to restyle them on your computer. If a world without web fonts that wouldn't be possible.

bouke 5y ago
Or even use Flash to do the rendering. There even was some library to do this for you.

grishka 5y ago

Yeah I mean > This is a good base because it lets website visitors start reading your content right away They're already reading the content. The one job your website had has already been accomplished without the custom font. As this guy[1] said, you first serve what's essential for your website's functionality, and then you stop. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U